GitHub helps companies, organizations, and groups of individuals succeed by allowing them to build better software, together. The launch of GitHub Copilot as a Technical Preview in June 2021 is a success, demonstrating the possibilities of AI-assisted software development.

Since that launch, GitHub has been working towards making the product generally available. The engineering organization is now looking for an experienced manager to join the Copilot team to lead the work to improve the quality of Copilot’s underlying machine learning model and its suggested completions.

The Copilot team currently has three subteams:

• Model Improvements: Responsible for improving the quality of the code suggested by Copilot.
• IDE: Responsible for delivering the GitHub Copilot IDE extension in a range of supported editors. 

• Foundations: responsible for the Copilot backend services, integration into GitHub proper, and data pipelines.

Your role will be to lead the Copilot Model Improvements team, continually improving the completions that are the core of Copilot. The team has close partnerships with Microsoft Azure AI Platform and OpenAI. It also has strong links with GitHub Next, a research team within GitHub investigating the future of software development, where Copilot was originally incubated.  A strong candidate will have experience successfully managing complex cross-team and cross-company projects.

The Copilot team is highly distributed and the right candidate will thrive in an environment of asynchronous communication. We expect you to have excellent written communication skills and be able to create working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe.  In this role you will lead, advise, and support your team. 

Responsibilities

• Guide and facilitate setting the direction for the team by understanding how company objectives map to team and group priorities. 
• Contribute to and create alignment within the team, with other Copilot teams, in the broader engineering organization, and with partner teams at Microsoft and OpenAI.
• Develop and improve on processes to manage the team’s progress and ensure that it is resourced correctly.
• Ensure that individuals learn, grow, and advance in their respective careers.
• Cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging.

Minimum Qualifications

• 4 or more years experience managing engineering, machine learning or data science teams.
• Experience with machine learning.
• Strong ability to communicate with senior management and distill complexity into easy to understand concepts that demonstrate impact.
• Enthusiasm for providing feedback, teaching others, and learning new techniques.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing distributed remote teams.
• Experience with Natural Language Processing and/or large language models such as GPT-3.
• Interest in modern AI/machine learning technologies and program synthesis in particular.

Nothing in life is perfect, including this job description. You may be an excellent fit even if you don’t meet all of these qualifications. We look forward to meeting you and hearing about your unique skills and experiences!

Minimum salary of $118,100 to maximum $250,600 + bonus + equity + benefits.

Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085 (8-5-20) of the minimum salary compensation for this role when being hired in Colorado.